Enigma 133: Are you positive?

On a 3-by-3 array like the one shown, I have coloured some of the little squares black and left the rest white. The four 2-by-2 corners of my pattern look like:

These are not necessarily the right way up and some, unfortunately, may be the negatives of what they should be. Sorry! But if I told you the colour of the middle square in the top row of my pattern and I told you the number of black squares in my pattern, then you’d be able to work out my pattern (the right way up too!).

Find my pattern, or the negative of it, whichever takes less shading.

Note: As stated I don’t think this problem has any solutions, but it is possible to add reasonable extra conditions to the problem in order to give a unique solution.

Like this:

One response to “Enigma 133: Are you positive?”

I’ve marked this puzzle as flawed, as given the most reasonable interpretation of the problem there are no patterns and orientations uniquely determined by the colour of the top middle square and the number of black squares.

However, it’s not unsalvageable, as we can add the following extra conditions to come up with a problem that has a unique solution. The first extra condition is to interpret the phrase “These are not necessarily the right way up” to mean “Some of the squares may be shown upside-down” (but not rotated by ±90°). The second extra condition is to consider that the 2×2 squares are presented in the following order NW, NE, SW, SE.

These seem to be reasonable assumptions to solve the problem, as if we were allowed arbitrary rotations and permutations of the smaller squares (without considering the possibility that they might be negatives) then any pattern that gives a solution would also give solutions for the three other rotations of the 3×3 square, which would stop you being able to uniquely identify a solution (unless the solution has rotational symmetry).

This Python program takes these additional conditions into account, and finds the solution. It runs in 36ms.